Five Examples of Great Website Policies

By Siteimprove

may. 07 2015 — Website Management

Last month we asked our customers what they've been doing with our new automated website policy feature, and they came back with some novel ideas. If you're looking for concrete examples of other organisations' website policies, you've come to the right place.

#1 Search and destroy outdated contact info

"I use the Policy module to find the pages on our website containing contact information for employees who are no longer employed, in order to delete these contact details. Our Danish website consists of approximately 4,500 pages, and our English website of approximately 700 pages. Because we have 850 employees in total, there are many employees who leave every month. Without the Policy module, it would mean a lot of work to find every instance manually."

- Bo Gade, University College Nordjylland

#2 Find updated form URLs

"We amended our forms' URL from an IP address so the new policy feature helped us to locate every single one of them!"

- Tina Ho, Perth & Kinross Council

#3 Track beta site progress and updating phone numbers

"[We flag] Lorum Ipsum on our forthcoming beta website… to keep track of live dummy pages yet to be populated with content.

[We also flag] obsolete telephone numbers that should no longer be on our website after the council's entire phone system changed and all phone numbers changed. Due to the previous devolved publishing model, lots of the obsolete numbers slipped through the net as distant staff publishers might have been aware of the change in telephone numbers."

- Adele Beeby, Leicester City Council

#4 Change department names

"There are often thousands of references to a department name on our website - so when that department changes its name, without Siteimprove's Policy feature we'd still be finding those old references years or even decades later!"

- Katie Hall, University of Bradford

#5 No more 'click here' as link text

"We have had all sorts of rules in place at different times, but by far the most useful is the "click here" rule.

To meet accessibility standards, all links should be descriptive and with this content policy rule we've been able to really efficiently target and reduce any where that people have put "click here" changing them for much more descriptive links such as "report flytipping".

It would have been an impossible and endless task without it, [Policy] is such a useful feature."

- Natalie Lloyd, Dorsetforyou.com

For more ways to use automated website policies, download the guide "Must-have policies for protecting your website".

How do you use policies? Tell us about your best website policies in the comments!